Quatro Meninas

...Everytime you see the oscars, the movies about the holocaust win the awards. Spike's movie lost out to a holocaust documentary that year. And I finally saw it with my own eyes. Hollywood sucks. This movie should have won the oscar for best documentary that year.

Spike Lee's documentary about the horrible 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that claimed the lives of four young girls. As a documentary, it achieves everything it should: it informs us, it moves us, and it reminds us of the evil that we Americans have in our past, and still have today. "Never forget", indeed. It goes without saying that this was an awful act of hatred and bigotry, its impact still sharply felt by friends and family of the victims. There is one amusing moment: a clip of George Wallace, years after the fact, trotting out his black "best friend" for the world to see, and the man clearly has contempt for Wallace. Speaking of trotting out, however, I question the need for Bill Cosby to chime in, or Jesse Jackson for that matter. There are plenty of articulate and interesting interviewees already involved without pulling in a couple of celebrity pals. It pulled me out of the film for a moment. Other than that, however, a strong and memorable film.

Whenever I happen to be in a group of people engaged in a discussion on race, whether it has been inspired by something currently in the news, or by an article or even a popular show on TV or a movie, there's always at least one person who asks, "With all the progress that's been made, why do black and Jewish people still put so much emphasis on race and prejudice?"

To answer that question for those people, no matter how well-intentioned they are in their ignorance, Spike Lee has made this film. You cannot be human and not be moved by the terrible story of the sacrifice that these little girls made, nor the lasting effect it had on everyone concerned. In its own way, this story is every bit as important as SCHINDLER'S LIST, and in the wake of recent events--church bombings, racial profiling by the police, the dubious success rate of our penal system turning young black men into hardened thugs into corpses--it is more important now than ever before that stories like these are told, to help us understand why we can only change the direction our generation seems to be headed in, by looking back at where we've been and what it cost us to get to where we are now.

Thanks to Spike Lee for telling this story in such a compelling manner. However, the use of the autopsy photos was so unnecessary. The horror of the event is evoked clearly by the lines on the faces of the survivors, and in their voices. I know the intent was to nail the point home, but for me, as a parent, seeing and hearing the story told by the family was almost too much to take in all at once.

I was not born when the Birmingham church bombing occurred. I first read about it when I was 10 or 11 in a Reader's Digest story and for some reason the names of the girls stuck in my mind all these years. I saw this on HBO and it is one of the only films that continued to leave an emotional impression on me long after it was over. Especially the haunting last image of Denise McNair happily holding her beloved (white) doll, and the overwhelming sense that someone who should be in the world today, is not with us. The interviews with family and friends of the girls are what makes this documentary special. Also it does a great job of educating people about Birmingham's civil rights history up to the bombing and just how it took an appalling act of violence to wake up white America. Let's hope it never takes this sort of crime again to make us wake up to other simmering injustices.